


Of Some Use

by halotolerant



Category: Ian Fleming - James Bond series
Genre: M/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:Ruuger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-23 01:27:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thank you elfwhistletree and hhertzof for great betas in eleventh-hour conditions - all remaining mistakes are mine.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Of Some Use

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you elfwhistletree and hhertzof for great betas in eleventh-hour conditions - all remaining mistakes are mine.

Only two of the men leaving the Pan American Airways flight at Bermuda International Airport were of particular interest to the flight attendant standing on the tarmac. It was another brilliant, hot day and he found the job distasteful ? sweat trickled down his neck and he was sure the heat beneath them did no good to his shoes.

The distraction of the men, therefore, came as a welcome one, and Georg studied them carefully. Neither very young nor very old, both well built and athletic in general, both with a small quantity of simple luggage and both partaking of the in-flight drinks with gusto. Nothing so much in any of that, a hundred such arrived in Bermuda every day.

But these were not junior executives, however much their clothes and papers told them as such. Neither, Georg thought, were they a couple escaping the gaze of American life for the relative tolerance of the island.

One, the dark haired man, roughly attractive and with eyes of a surprising blue, was carrying a gun holstered almost inconspicuously under his linen jacket.

The other, a Texan by the sound of it, blonde and slightly more broad-shouldered, seemed to have something wrong with his left leg ? able to walk only when leaning on a cane that might have belonged to a man thirty years older -and had in place of his right hand a large and lethal-looking hook.

Georg had flinched without thinking; the first time the man had raised it to indicate something on the menu. He hoped very much that he?d not given offence, but also couldn?t help wishing he?d had the gumption to ask about it.

With some interest, Georg watched their slow progress. Such men allowed one to think that, perhaps, one had been quite fortunate in life.

\- - -  
\- - -

James Bond signed the hotel register with a careless gesture of bored irritation. The clerk, preoccupied with a message just brought him by the bellhop, nodded and closed the book again without noticing the fact that the signature before him was utterly illegible.

"Mr Bryce?" The clerk's tone was pained, apologetic.

Bond turned a cold eye on him. It had been a long flight and before that a long week. Not forty-eight hours previously he?d been bare-knuckle fighting in a heroin warehouse in San Francisco, worrying even as he calculated his blows that his opponent would push back his injured arm against the split bags of powder and cause the drug to enter his system.

"Yes?"

"I am very sorry, sir, but - such short notice, you understand - there is only one room available, a twin, sir, but one room."

Bond suppressed a noise of tired frustration. "You could have told us earlier, I think. Well, in that case we try an alternative hotel. Somewhere in Bermuda there must be adequate space for two persons."

Bond turned to Leiter and was surprised to see the man's face was grey and ashen.

"If you don't mind, James," Leiter said- it was more like a gasp, his teeth were gritted. "I could really do with a hunker down before I travel any further. We can always move tomorrow."

Bond assessed him swiftly, still not fully comprehending, but rapidly convinced that he was not asking out of mere inertia.

"Very well then. No, no, we'll take our own cases, thank you. Please telephone the other hotels on the island possessing a barman who knows a rosso from a Punt e mes and let us know of their availabilities."

Bond walked across the floor to the elevator, aware of the limp in Leiter's gait as he followed, more pronounced now than it had been during the preceding weeks of casework. He let Leiter pass first through the elevator doors and then watched as the bellhop, rubbing his ear - the clerk had found a lower form of life to take his frustrations out on, it seemed - selected the top floor.

\- - -

"It ain't your beloved Jamaica, I suppose." Leiter pushed open the latticed shutters and leant out of the large window of the bedroom, looking out as the calm blue carpet of sea turned to fire in the sunset in front of them. "But it's not so bad either. And the fish may have a superior temperament further north."

Bond grunted, arranging his Morlands in their silver case for his dinner jacket. He had no wish to remember his own losses to a barracuda, still less those of Leiter.

Few things troubled Bond, (there was no time in this life for regret, or at least, once you allowed regret there was no time for anything else) but occasionally when his physical and mental resources ran low - five days ago, squatting in a cellar in Chinatown, rats slithering over his neck - his mind would put before him the day they'd delivered Felix's barely living body to him in Florida.

"Aw, c'mon. You've got to laugh or what you gonna do? Me, I hate crying."

"You seem recovered from earlier."

"All this sea air, James. Healing. Sea air and sun and sand and... Yeah, sea air."

Bond selected some silver cuff-links and did them up, walking across the room to take a better look at the view.

"And somewhere out there," Leiter gave a wide sweep of his hand. "Somewhere out there is the Bermuda triangle. All the lost things of the world, right there." Letting his arm drop, he seemed to consider. "Like us."

"False connection," Bond studied him carefully for the second time that day - had he already been drinking? "We aren't lost, we're hiding. And not for long either. My superiors only cut me some slack on the understanding I don't pull too hard. Are you coming for supper?"

"Sure. My appetite never does well in the heat, but I always enjoy watching a man eat who knows his food. And you, my friend, know chapter and verse."

Leiter went through to the bedroom to change. He was now, Bond noticed, barely limping at all.

\- - -

Bond could appreciate that, to an American like Felix, his own merely sensible understanding of complementary foodstuffs could appear to be that of a gourmet, but it was not a role he coveted. Nonetheless he allowed himself a quiet pride of his selection of their evening menu; local chowder served with sherry pepper sauce and delicate curls of avocado, accompanied by an excellent Adriatic Verdicchio, dry and crisp to the point of acidity.

There was one problem, however. Finally, pushing his chair a little out from the table and lighting a Morland, Bond came out with it: "You don't like the food?"

"The heat," Leiter shrugged and put his fork down on his plate. "Nothing kills an appetite quicker."

"I thought you were raised in a desert in Texas?"

"And you were brought up in a series of ski chalets, am I forcing you to drink hot chocolate?"

"If you're feeling unwell..." Bond was confused - the irritability in Leiter was unprecedented. Usually if either of them did not wish to talk they would let the conversation die away naturally and sit enjoying a comfortable silence.

"I'm afraid I think I am." Leiter stood, awkwardly, grasping for his cane whilst unable to keep his balance on the table adequately with the hook. "I think I'll go back upstairs. You clean out the roulette for me, eh buddy?"

Bond watched his heavily limping departing form uncertainly - he was clearly going to have to keep his eyes open for answers.

He was not expecting that they would come rapidly.

\- - -

"Do you mean to tell me," Bond turned the thing over in his hand, trying to restrain the urge to snap it, to crush it to pieces under his heel, "that you've been using this stuff during the assignment?"

The hypodermic glinted in the light from the bedside lamp.

Leiter was sitting on the bed, cradling his hook in his hand and rubbing absently around where the prosthesis fitted to his skin. "I'm not of any great use in a case without it, surely you can see that? And that's not self-pity talking, that's plain hard facts. If I want to gallivant around saving the Western world, nowadays I can't do it alone."

When Bond had first walked into the bedroom to change out of his evening wear - the bedroom, larger than the sitting room, opened off it and from the bedroom the small en suite - and had found the open box on Leiter's bedside table, rage had caught him off guard. Rage and, he saw now, a kind of fear. A fear that Leiter would have all the cloying, cunning excuses of a dope addict, that a mask would strip away and his friend would be revealed to be long gone.

But Leiter was calm and somewhat melancholy, and Bond began to feel like an idiot - if Leiter had wanted to conceal this, it had been well within his abilities to do so.

"You could have just told me."

"Tell you what? I don't know the half of it. The doc said some nerve in my leg, my old leg," he patted the stump, "got ripped but not cut. It still carries feeling, but not real ones. That's why I get this pain." He stopped, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists.

"It wasn't this bad before." As he spoke, Bond was aware that, all told, he had in the past five years seen barely more than five weeks of Leiter. In his social landscape, which had many features, there were only a few true welcome sights and Leiter had long been one of them, and yet they had never seen each other but when simultaneously trying to avoid getting killed.

"You know as well as I do that morphine's a capitalist drug - you only ever want more. Three years ago a tablet set me up for the day. Now it's that thing and more and more often. On a case, I keep on top of it, of the pain. I have to. Now I'm trying to come off again and I thought... Well, put it this way, if you want to up sticks and move to another hotel, I shouldn't think the less of you for it."

Bond put the hypodermic back in its velvet nest carefully and tried to answer lightly. "M would be worried that I failed to notice. Would say I need a refresher course for my powers of deduction."

Leiter gave short, bitter laugh. "Yeah, a real Sherlock, except Watson's got the habit this time." Then he sighed and ran a hand over his face. "I'm sorry, James. No man wants to be seen at the mercy of anything, least of all himself."

"Haven't you seen me brought low often enough?" Bond felt unaccountably edgy, his heart rate speeding up and a strange, falling sensation in his stomach. He felt as he had once in a nightmare, one night sleeping alone in Prague and dreaming he was being handed the baton of a Philharmonic Orchestra and required to conduct them.

He turned and looked back at Leiter. For the first time, he wondered how many other men were left who could remember Leiter as he had been, when he ran every morning and was ascending easily through the CIA to undoubted glory. And who was there now for him? After all those years of service?

"Well we have a week here," he said slowly. "And you're not on a case. If you can go without this for a week, you can go without it for a lifetime - or at least that?s what they taught me about cigarettes when they banged me up in that health farm in Sussex."

For a moment, Leiter smiled at him with a great deal of warmth. Then he looked away and chuckled.

"Sure, that's great. Because you certainly don't smoke now."

Bond shrugged. "I didn't assert I was stronger than you at this sort of thing. I just pick my vices with more care."

He sat down next to Leiter and extracted his silver cigarette case, took two and lit them.

Leiter lay back on the bed to smoke his, eyes closed as if through exhaustion.

Bond stayed with him a little while, and then went to perform his own ablutions. Returning, he removed Leiter's shoes, loosened his tie and swung his legs onto the bed into a more comfortable position.

Such things he had done for him before, when paralytically drunk or badly injured.

It was amazing, when you thought over it all, he mused idly before drifting to sleep himself, that either of them were still alive to have vices at all.

\- - -

The next day the hypodermic and the small bottles of clear fluid remained in the chest of drawers. Leiter began the day uncomfortable and agitated and as the morning progressed only grew worse.

"Oh heck..." Leiter grabbed the neatly folded damp flannel Bond passed him and bit down onto it, screwing up his eyes. He obviously found being heard to cry out from pain shaming - something Bond sympathised with entirely - and Bond had reasoned that the moisture would do his dry, worn throat some good.

Sweat stood out on Leiter's brow, and his countenance was once more the ashen grey that Bond had seen it to be as they checked into the hotel. Lying supine on his bed, he alternately grabbed his thigh and rubbed at the base of the prosthesis.

Bond continued his breakfast (the scrambled eggs were not all they might have been, he felt) and attempted to read the paper. It would after all do no good to hover over the man and ultimately only annoy both of them. Nonetheless, he cast glances across the room periodically and checked his watch to be sure of when he could offer Leiter another cachet faivre.

Time passed.

Bond had assumed, or at least had hoped that as matters progressed, Leiter would become exhausted, and no longer wracked by such discomfort. What he had failed to take account of - he now realised - was the competing agonies of opiate withdrawal and Leiter's own pre-existing pain.

In the early evening, as another sunset fell red and bloody through the sky, Leiter was still writhing.

Bond, who had taken lunch and dinner in the suite and felt acutely his lack of exercise that day, at length went over to his curled figure.

"Try walking."

"I can't walk!"

"Get up and walk. Walk up and down, it doesn't matter if you use the stick or don't make a convincing heir to Gene Kelly."

With a distinct grumble, Leiter took his hand and Bond assisted him up and for the first few steps, until Leiter pushed him away. "This hurts worse."

"You always walk off an injury - if you'd gone to an English Public School you'd know that. My old housemaster," Bond was talking just to talk now, aware that when he distracted Leiter he seemed to move more easily, "once made me run three laps of our second-largest playing field after I twisted my ankle."

"You're a crazy nation, you know that? Aaah..." Failing to concentrate, Leiter fell sideways and had to use his cane and grab the nearest piece of furniture.

"I think he knew that life, successful life, involves endurance. He'd been in the Great War and had lost his arm. We parodied him mercilessly in secret."

"Huh."

"One day he asked me, if I had a choice, if I'd lose my eyes or my hands. I told him 'my hands sir' without really thinking and he asked me if I really meant it."

Leiter was moving again, drawn into the story.

"And I said 'I don't know, sir' and he told me that was the choice they'd offered him, the soldiers that had captured him in the war. His eyes or his hands."

"I thought you said the guy lost an arm?"

"Yes. While he was escaping from them. You see, he thought - still having one hand and both eyes at the end - that he was lucky." Bond trailed off, not quite sure why he'd brought the story up - he was not one for parables and that the explanation of his point might lead back to Leiter's situation had not at first occurred to him.

"I thought he was a fool," he added, by way of conclusion. "I thought that if I was a soldier, I'd never let myself be captured. It's funny how adult and yet how idiotic one can be as a child."

"We had a guy like that back home. Well, not exactly. Ancient old man, way past eighty. Fought in the Civil War and didn?t let you forget it. He had a glass eye and he'd take it out if you asked him nice and show you the way they'd painted on the colours with the thinnest paintbrushes in existence."

As he spoke, Leiter continued to pace up and down, painfully and ungracefully but keeping going. Bond fell in step with him as far as was possible and when after a while Leiter took his arm for support, neither made any notice of it.

\- - -

By the end of the third day in the hotel room, pacing and ordering endless pitchers of iced water, Bond had begun to re-evaluate a great deal of what he'd thought he'd known about drugs, addicts and the methods of withdrawal.

Taught to regard addicts in a similar light to homosexuals and those who had relatives in unsavoury political parties - possibly well enough in their way, but too easily blackmailed to be trusted - he had never tried to see the struggle such a person might face as anything but a punishment for their own weaknesses.

Now, sitting on the cool tiled floor and leaning back against the door to the corridor - Leiter could escape any number of other ways if he wanted to, but it was obscurely reassuring to block the most obvious one - Bond lit his thirtieth cigarette of the night and felt the weariness as if the struggle was his own.

In the en suite bathroom, Leiter was vomiting the little food he'd been able to eat. His appetite was coming back with a vengeance, but his system in general was still so disordered as to reject almost anything but clear soup and weak, milk-less tea.

"God, I'd kill for a proper coffee," Leiter had mumbled earlier, self-deprecating chuckle edging on to hysteria. "Not this Italian crap or what you British seem to think is the same thing but must make with ground acorns. Real American coffee, that's what I need."

Bond had ordered the likeliest item from room service but, as with some earlier experiments, the willing spirit had had to succumb to the weak flesh, and Leiter was feeling the consequences. Bond did not propose to go and stand by him or clean him up - he was not a nursemaid - but he had already ordered more water and some slices of lemon to cleanse the palate.

Outside the moon was very full, and cast a thin pale glow through the shutters. Somewhere below out on the beach a woman's laughter rose like bubbles through champagne.

Bond drew deep on the cigarette and then watched the smoke leave his body. Except of course that it did not leave entirely - a doctor had shown him a series of slides once, the lungs of smokers and non-smokers at post mortem.

Bond had quelled the urge to point out that, perforce; the non-smokers were nonetheless just as dead.

Self-destructiveness was not a quality he perceived in himself, nor hedonism nor dependency. And yet how much harder would it be to undergo these endless days without these foolish, comforting dried leaves?

Rumination of this kind he also disapproved of - it was inclined to bring low one's spirits, and only a fool would do that to themselves.

It was hard not to think, however, when the nights were so long and the associations so many.

He had one dependency, perhaps - that on his own self-image. Of power and of will to power, of his own fatalism and lack of regard for the numinous.

Stubbing his cigarette in the filling ash-tray, Bond leant his head back until the hard surface of the door pressed painfully into his skull; yes, the struggle of the addict was becoming ever clearer to him.

\- - -

It was towards the evening of the fifth day before Bond thought much of Leiter's habit of rubbing at where the plastic base of his hook (which fitted like a shallow cup over his stump, strapped with leather to his shoulder for support) met the skin of his arm some few inches below his elbow.

He put down his book (from the hotel shop where, regretfully, 'Love of the Desert Sheikh' was the most literary offering available).

"Does that hurt you as well?"

Leiter, lying across one of the beds, looked across at him warily. His condition was much improved than in preceding days, and the worst of the withdrawal seemed to be past, but he looked, Bond thought, old. As if he had lived more years since their first meeting - Royale-les-Eaux, another world - than the mere nine chronologically passed.

And yet it was nine years. "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges" - Bond could not recall the source of the quote, but unbidden it arose from some schoolboy ingestion and made him shiver. He recalled himself and Leiter driving about Florida during the Mr Big case, recoiling from the elderly people they saw and wishing themselves to die a young man's death.

"Your arm. Your hook," Bond was embarrassed to find even he could not say it easily. "It hurts you to wear it."

When there was no response, he moved to kneel on the bed, taking Leiter's arm with his hands in a brisk, clinical fashion. It was the first time he had intentionally touched the prosthesis and he found the slide of the plastic distasteful.

Where the edges of the 'cup' pressed there was indeed a red pressure line, but nothing that might warrant the apparent discomfort.

Without asking, and that not because of courage, Bond reached for the straps further up the arm, loosening the buckles and then, carefully, edging the plastic and metal away, separating the mask from the man.

"Felix..." The name escaped his lips like a swear word, almost a whisper.

Bond had seen his share, more than his share, of wounds. Many of them had been his own and not a few of them had been Leiter's. And this was not so horrible, not purulent or malodorous or particularly deep.

And yet seeing it felt like cold slug to the gut, turned his stomach in way few worse specimens had.

It was as though the spectre of Leiter's pain - something Bond could not imagine, but only imitate with his own memories of agony, which seemed rather a lot when tallied - which had hovered in the room for days, overpowering both of them, had suddenly received a face. This problem, this skin rubbed red-raw and angry by the prosthesis base, was probably the least of Leiter's discomforts, but seeing something made it all more viscerally real.

"Felix," Bond said again. How could it be Felix, really- Felix Leiter had been a lanky blonde, all legs and arms, deceptively boyish, laughing at how they ran circles around the FBI or the NYPD.

"They have a new kind now," Leiter was speaking slowly, soberly, his words also hushed. "You can pick things up with it, like a pincer. Custom-fitted, if you pay right. But free-lance world-saving doesn't bring in the biggest bucks. And in the meantime, I have to have something."

Bond bit his lip.

"I have money. Damn your pride and take it and get yourself something that won't do this."

"And what if my pride is all I have?"

"Why? Why does it have to work like that? If you were my brother or my wife or my son you'd take it as your right. And you're the nearest I have to any of those." Bond felt himself flushing and looked away. "In fact, I think you owe it to me to take it. For every minute I watched you breathing, when they sent you to me like a piece of meat. I would have paid god knows what sum not to have had to live those minutes."

"Well, naturally from where I was they were peachy keen." Leiter said the words flippantly, but something - his tone, his humour, the fact that he had lived - made Bond smile, and Leiter, looking at him, caught it, and soon they were laughing uproariously, wearing themselves out with pleasure for a change.

When the ability to breathe returned, Bond sat up again - they had both ended up lying across the width of Leiter's bed, clutching their abdomens to relieve the diaphragmatic agonies of hysteria - and then went into the bathroom.

"This is supposed to be for burns," he said, passing Leiter the long grey tube from his first aid kit. "But I think the general principle is the same."

"Clean area before use," Leiter read off the side. "Not a bad idea. A good soak would be just the ticket. I don't think I've had a proper wash since we got here. Christ, what a week. On the back of an op like that too - next time you want to be good for my health remind me and I'll book a month in a spa to recover afterwards."

Bond couldn't suppress another wide smile.

Grinning back, Leiter limped carefully across to start running the taps.

"You know, James," he called out, as the first clouds of stream began to creep round the door, "You don't have to sit here yet another evening. This is supposed to be rest, after all. Why not go and mingle in the bar and have some fun? Or whatever it is you stiff-shirt English feel."

The idea was tempting, Bond had to admit. He was not good at confinement and accustomed, happily, to spending a large portion of his day in solitude. A quiet martini, a round of roulette, an exchange of pleasantries with a young woman poured into a cocktail dress.... Most tempting.

"Are you sure you'll be alright?"

"Yes, yes. Go!"

His mind made up, he went to his wardrobe to extract more suitable attire.

"I'll get back before one," he called through the door.

"Don't expect me to be waiting up in a rocking chair," Leiter called back.

\- - -

The larger of the hotel's bars was a carefully preserved relic of the heydays of the 1920s, with mirrored surfaces in every direction and strange Art Deco shapes looming from the light fittings. There was a busy atmosphere without any suggestion of stress or crush and the barman did indeed appear to know his vermouths.

Bond was sitting on a high stool at the bar, pondering the relative merits of good bars and good cuisine in hotels when a young woman came to sit next to him, affected not to take him in and ordered a whiskey sour. She was slender without being thin, a slight chest compensated for by a generosity of shape in general and the whole set off well by a backless gown of some dark purple fabric. Her diamonds were understated but, on slightly closer inspection of her long neck, extremely good quality.

Taking quite a lot of her drink, she extracted a tortoiseshell cigarette holder from her handbag and then searched fruitlessly for her cigarettes - an outcome Bond had predicted from almost the moment she sat down.

"Excuse me." Her voice was rich, with an Italian accent rolling on the consonants. "But could you lend me something for the cigarette machine?"

Bond surveyed her - jet black hair immaculately coiffured, lips painted a deep red and slightly open in unconscious invitation. He imagined following the little play script she had set them - reaching for his own cigarettes, offering her one and watching her lips close around it as she smoked. Small conversation, never to convey meaning except by prolonging the exchange of non-verbals. And later a walk on the beach - was she the woman with the champagne laugh? - Or a drink in her room and then, then the delicious inevitable.

As if sensing indecision he was himself barely aware of, the woman gave a dry chuckle and made another attempt. "It's been so warm today I thought the evening would never come. I sat in my suite and simply dreamt of escape."

Her eyes were heavy-lidded and barely made-up, a natural darkness of the iris making them intriguing.

"What can you want to escape from?" It was not what he meant to say and he could see from her face that he had not said it in a tone that could pass for flirtatious.

Nonetheless she rallied and smiled a little. "Boredom, for the most part. A woman travelling alone becomes very... bored at times."

The angry, interrogative mood would not go away: "And why are you alone?"

She was clearly annoyed, but answered, and with something about her eyes that made Bond believe her.

"I guess every guy I ever met; it was easier to leave them than be with them." With nervous swiftness she took a quick gulp of her drink, and then gave a merry laugh she had probably copied from a film actress. "And I so much prefer not to be dependent on anyone or anything."

Bond regarded her for a second, eyes widening, then leapt from his stool, casting paper money at the barman without checking its value. "This woman's drink is on me. Keep the change."

Despite the gesture she pouted at him, crossing her arms with an expression of disgust. "What on earth's up with you?"

"You're lying. Oh, don't pull a face you little idiot. You know you're lying. You're not independent; you're just adept at choosing your vices. Good evening."

And with that, ignoring her gasp of outrage, he strode rapidly away.

\- - -

As Bond approached the door to the suite his pace slowed; he felt a sudden resurgence of fearful anticipation which he had ever since he'd left been trying his best to quell.

If Leiter wanted to leave, he could. If Leiter had sent him away to facilitate that purpose then perhaps James had misunderstood everything, perhaps the knowledge that made his chest pound with an almost religious fervour was no more than a passing rapture, a convert made and lost once the preacher stops speaking.

Keeping his hands steady, he put the key in the lock and opened the door.

None of the lights within the living room were on. Nor - he could see - were the ones in the bedroom.

"Leiter?"

The suite was silent.

He moved forward - neither of the beds was occupied.

"Leiter? Felix?"

Another idea, a horrible one, occurred to him quite vividly.

It was, after all, a very sharp hook.

With a feeling like a lump of cold granite his stomach he knocked on the bathroom door, then put his shoulder to it, bursting through the doorway into a room lined with cold moisture.

There, lying on the floor with a spongebag under his head and the towel covering his body, was Leiter.

He was, gently and peacefully, asleep.

Bond sank onto the rim of the bath and tried to breathe again.

After a few minutes, there was a movement at his feet.

"James? You won't believe it - after all my posturing saying I was fine - I couldn't get in. Couldn't make my leg bend right and I'm not exactly well-balanced on the other. And then I somehow fell down and I was so tired - gee, it's nice to be tired again, properly, not just like a dishrag - and I thought 'the heck with it' and had forty winks."

Bond shook his head wonderingly and laughed, relief still pouring through him. "You'll be freezing."

"I grew up in a desert in Texas you know," Leiter grinned. "I'll take you there someday; show you what a night feels like in February."

"That non-withstanding, do you want a bath now?"

"Sure. I'll not say no."

\- - -

As the bath filled with hot water, Bond changed into his shirtsleeves and the loose linen trousers he usually wore to sleep in. Thus prepared, he returned to assist Leiter with the difficult moment of balance necessary to move from the floor to the water.

Leiter was still wearing nothing at all. Bond was loath to be the one to suggest fetching him anything in case he interpreted it as disgust at his mangled appearance. He had seen Leiter nude before, as he had seen most men he'd worked with over any significant period - their sort of work left no time for coy niceties.

And yet there was world of difference between nude and naked, and it was the latter word that on this occasion came to mind.

As he entered the hot water, Leiter groaned in what sounded more like pain than pleasure.

Bond picked up a sponge and a bar of soap, feeling as if he were watching someone else acting for him. This felt natural enough and in the small, warm room it was easy to feel that nothing was unusual in it, but he thought back to his earlier days hiding behind his newspaper and his careful consideration of Leiter's dignity and wondered if he'd had the right idea - or at least the safer one - then.

After working up a lather, he began to spread the soap across Leiter's skin, allowing him to sit still and not demand any more of his muscles. It was a hypnotic process, punctuated only by the splash of the sponge returning to the water and he could see that Leiter's eyes were closed.

The muscles of Leiter's back were very uneven, the right side bunched and hypertrophied to supply the good hand and compensate for the bad leg. Bond pressed them more firmly as he washed and Leiter grunted. He went over them again, alternating his pressure, trying to remember what his masseuse had done at Shrublands, when she'd made him feel like his whole body had been polished.

Leiter moaned again, and then moved - Bond thought at first to pull away, but it was only to get his flannel and bite on it. Carefully, Bond proceeded, until the knots and tightening wore away under his fingers and Leiter was breathing more deeply and easily.

He was just moving on to consider the right biceps when Leiter took the flannel out and placed his hand over Bond's.

Leiter's eyes were earnest and wide and dark.

"The pain won't ever go away completely, James. You have to understand that. This is... God, this is fantastic but if I'm moving and walking and... living, then it's going to be there. Unless I take the dope, which thank Christ I don't feel the itch for any more - that's one thing you've done for me that I'll owe you for all my life."

"One doctor told you all that, probably a quack on government money. There are nerve specialists, surgeons - someone will know a better way than this." Bond spoke urgently, searching Leiter's face for some sign of a sparked hope. "Why is that people like us never accept defeat professionally, and yet so easily in our own lives?"

"What defeats can the infamous James Bond boast? Did your housekeeper finally demand emancipation and chain herself to a haggis?"

"I thought I knew a thing or two about myself, about my life. I don't think so any more."

"That's mighty deep - where'd that spring from?" Leiter spoke jovially, but Bond was aware of him licking his lips to be able to speak, of the persistent pressure of his hand.

"Just something a woman in the bar said. About things being easy."

"A woman was talking about things being easy and you left?"

"There was nothing easy about her. At least - stop laughing - not the right things."

Leiter's gaze was too much. Bond ducked his head and picked up the sponge again.

"What shall I do next?"

He had seen, as he retrieved the sponge, what from the corner of his eye he had already guessed at.

Leiter was hard.

Normal enough, perhaps, with nerve injuries. Or indeed with massage. It was all a question of nerves really, of strange electric connections and nothing to attribute any more interest to than a hiccup.

So why was heat racing to his face in a way it hadn't since his maid at Eton had first told him there were places to kiss besides his mouth?

Leiter, too, was flushing.

"No, James."

"Why not?"

Leiter made a vague sort of hand gesture - "In a case of unequal positions..."

It only took a second - Bond climbed into the bath with him, fully clothed as he was.

"There. That level enough for you?"

For a moment Leiter stared at him, and Bond wondered if he was about to be punched. Then something seemed to satisfy him and his eyes danced mischievously.

"Almost. If I just..."

He reached out under the water and tugged at the strings of Bond's trousers, loosening them from his waist and revealing the erection Bond had been trying his level best to ignore for what felt like far too long.

Leiter grinned. "There now. God, there now."

He moved his hand. Bond grabbed it up and kissed the palm, then let it return to its path.

They moved on each other tentative and clumsy as boys, but nothing Bond had ever done in the fearful silence of a dormitory, or even after, with any woman in any bed in the world, had felt quite like it.

Before the crest came, he surged forward, touching Leiter's face with his free hand and bringing him in close to kiss him, catching his final, ecstatic moan minutes later.

Breaking free of his mouth, Leiter gasped.

"Fuck. Holy fuck," he laughed again, smiling widely but with something else behind his eyes. "Fuck, James, but this is going to be one bitch of habit to break."

Bond pressed their lips together again briefly. "Who says we have to?"

"Morphine, my government can tolerate." Leiter's voice was serious now. "Being in love with you, it cannot."

Bond froze.

"I need my job. I need money. Are you really suggesting I come and play house with you, because that's what it'll have to mean."

Bond spread his hands out, open: "If you want to, yes."

Leiter shook his head sadly. "Hell, you've had more cocktails than you know. And I think," he gripped the rim of the bath, bracing his weight, "that if you'll just be so kind as to help me out of here, we should probably go now. Maybe start playing at cold, hard reality again."

\- - -

Only two men of any particular interest got off the plane into the rain and darkness at Heathrow.

A young man attending the taxi rank, whose badge proclaimed 'Frederick' but would never be anything but Fred, watched them coming towards him.

Although they walked in step - inasmuch as the darker waited for his companion's slow pace - they did not speak to each other, and in general their mood seemed oddly subdued for those who had just enjoyed a holiday in the Bermudas.

The blonde one, Fred noted, had a rather dashing hook in place of his right hand and aided his slow pace with a cane.

The dark man requested two taxis, curtly and Fred, rolling his eyes, sorted them out, moved their luggage, yelled at a woman going the wrong way for the queue and generally made himself useful.

The two men walked to their two taxis and climbed in.

The front one released its handbrake and began to move. In the process of doing so however, it stopped, abruptly, lurching in place with the brake's reapplication.

The blonde man opened the door. Awkwardly, he climbed out of it. He moved, stumbling, through the rain towards the car behind just as its motor started up.

There was another lurch and the door of the second taxi was flung open with a cry Fred heard but could not interpret. The blonde man climbed in next to his companion and...

The door swung closed again. There was a brief pause and then the taxi sped away into the night.

Neither man had deigned, Fred noted, to tip him.

Some people, he thought bitterly, were just plain selfish.

\- - -

  



End file.
